It's been an odd week. I've had 3 Indians contact me, repeatedly, via email, asking me to do their work for them.

The first was a MSCE who works for Intel. This guy basically couldn't figure out how his compiler works. He doesn't know anything about building packages from source and wants bugfixes for wvWare that are available only in its recent 1.2.0 release. His machine runs (as best I can tell) a 4+-year-old Linux distro and he's complaining about glib-2.0 dependencies. I've been as patient and helpful as I can be (repeating things in the README and INSTALL files before telling him to RTFM), but don't I know that his project for Intel was due yesterday? Does no one at Intel know about ./configure && make?

The second was a student in Bangalore who "demands" that I do his CS homework for him. I pointed this guy to some relevant literature for his project (texts summarization, like I worked on for OTS) and politely told him that he would only learn by doing the work himself. Outrage, I tell you! Didn't I know his homework was due?

The third was a guy who "demands" that I export Microsoft Word art as LaTeX from wvWare immediately. I told this guy that we currently convert the art to PNGs and that converting it to LaTeX would be a lot of work that I don't feel like doing. Heresy!

These guys have all been extremely polite, but forceful, persistent, and presumptuous. What's in it for me? Intel isn't going to fire me and I won't be kicked out of school due to bad grades. Like I said, it's been an odd week...